The DOJ announced that Daniel Kahn became Chief of the FCPA Unit, effective June 1.
Kahn had been acting chief of the FCPA Unit since March, when his then boss, Patrick Stokes, became Senior Deputy Chief of the Fraud Section. Charles Duross had led the FCPA Unit before Stokes.
Kahn joined the Fraud Section in 2010. He was promoted to Assistant Chief of the FCPA Unit in 2013.
Kahn was the lead prosecutor on ten corporate FCPA enforcement actions, including Alstom. The company paid $772 million in criminal penalties — the biggest criminal fine ever levied for FCPA offenses and the second biggest FCPA enforcement action overall.
He was also a prosecutor on the Haiti teleco case. A Miami jury convicted Joel Esquenazi and Carlos Rodriguez, former executives of Terra Telecommunications Corp., of bribing officials at Haiti’s state-owned telecom company.
Esquenazi is serving a 15-year jail sentence, the longest FCPA-related sentence ever imposed. Rodriguez was jailed seven years.
In the same case, Robert Antoine, a former employee of Haiti’s state-owned national telecommunications company, pleaded guilty to money laundering and was sentenced to four years in prison.
Esquenazi and Rodriguez appealed their convictions to the U.S. Supreme Court. They said the definition of the “foreign official” in the FCPA was vague and the DOJ’s interpretation of it was wrong. The Supreme Court rejected their appeal in 2014.
Kahn graduated from Cornell and Harvard Law School. He spent six years at Davis Polk before joining the DOJ Fraud Section.
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Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. He’ll be the keynote speaker at the FCPA Blog NYC Conference 2016.
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